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Onward Christian Scholars

Dr. Mitchell Stokes (second from left), a fellow of humanities at New St. Andrews, leads a student discussion in his backyard.Credit
Reuben Cox

EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON in Moscow, Idaho, a strange commotion overruns Main Street. A stream of young men and women parade down the sidewalk, wearing black academic gowns that billow and flap as they walk. Some pore over Latin textbooks or thumb flashcards of ancient Greek vocabulary, nearly tripping at the curb. They are students at New St. Andrews College on their way to disputatio, a weekly assembly held in a movie theater downtown. The college itself has no room large enough to accommodate all 150 students at once: it occupies a single unassuming brick building a few blocks away, one that a stranger might mistake for the refurbished husk of an old savings and loan. Passers-by on their way to the Pita Pit or Hodgins Drug barely give the students a second glance. Not a few residents, however, have fought hard to keep them out of downtown. Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews represents a new philosophy of evangelical education — one that has inspired a national movement and makes local liberals nervous.

The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.” He’s not alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas. Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.”

When you ask teachers and students what sort of school New St. Andrews is, they often cite one school they are not: Patrick Henry College, the evangelical college in Purcellville, Va., with a reputation for training home-schooled Christian students to wrest the reins of power from “secular humanists” in Washington. “We believe in a much longer view,” says Joshua Appel, a professor at New St. Andrews. The curriculum is modeled on the vision of “New England’s First Fruits,” a 1643 Massachusetts Bay Colony pamphlet describing the college lately founded in Cambridge. Besides required coursework in Latin and Greek, students at N.S.A. study natural philosophy (mostly taxonomy and creationist science), the Western literary canon, Euclidean geometry and theology; they also practice public speaking at a weekly declamation. Students drag themselves out of bed for classes that meet at 7:30 am, only half an hour later than classes once did at Puritan Harvard.

This curriculum is a “reformation in higher education,” says Roy Atwood, the college president. “The last thing we wanted to be was a Liberty University or a Patrick Henry. We are not interested in political takeover.” Patrick Henry — which requires classical core classes and offers a major in classical liberal arts as well as more political fields — hemorrhaged faculty and students a year ago as a debate over academic freedom and the role of the liberal arts in Christian education divided the campus. “I wonder if the N.S.A. people are right,” says G. T. Smith, a philosophy professor who left Patrick Henry after the turmoil.

New St. Andrews is turning away from the Moral Majority’s legacy of political involvement, but it has not turned its back on the culture war. The Latin motto on water bottles and Frisbees for sale in the college bookstore makes the point plain: Numquam Bella Piis, Numquam Certanima Desunt — “For the faithful, wars shall never cease.”

IN CERTAIN WAYS, Moscow is an unlikely home for New St. Andrews. The town is “a little blue dot in an ocean of red,” says Doug Wilson, who looks more like a lumberjack than a pastor, even when he wears a suit. The presence of the publicly financed University of Idaho has long made it a typical college town. On Main Street, multicolored fliers flutter in the doorway of the Golden Blue Lotus Tara Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Center.

A handful of people gather for regular antiwar demonstrations on Friendship Square, adjacent to New St. Andrews. The well-combed and collared students inside seem too busy reading Plato to pay attention.

In the student directory, a note on the first page explains the absence of street addresses of the homes where students board (the college opposes dorms on principle). “It seems there are people in the community who make a hobby of causing trouble for local Christian families who extend hospitality to N.S.A. students,” reads the disclaimer. “So as a courtesy to these families, and as a hedge against whatever else the ‘Intoleristas’ have up their sleeve, we’re making it a tad bit harder for them.” “Intolerista” is Wilson’s nickname for his liberal critics. Some have filed zoning complaints against N.S.A. host families for supposedly running illegal boarding houses. Rival coffee shops have sprung up. The Christians drink their lattes at Bucer’s, which is outfitted like an English pub and is named after the Reformation theologian Martin Bucer. The Starbucks-like One World Cafe is the reputed liberal hangout. “There are a bunch of people who hate N.S.A.,” says Laura Blakey, a 25-year-old alumna. “I think our Christianity offends them.”

Doug Wilson proudly declares himself more right-wing than most Idaho conservatives. “They voted for Bush; I’d vote for Jefferson Davis,” he chuckles. Over the past two decades, he has founded a successful classical Christian K-12 school, and his congregation, Christ Church, has expanded to about 1,000 members. “It’s Wilson Inc.,” says Rose Huskey, a longtime Moscow resident who met with me for two hours to detail Wilson’s crimes and offer boxes of documentation she has filed away at home. Wilson’s critics view him as a right-wing Pied Piper luring like-minded Christians to overrun the town: families from as far away as France have moved to Moscow to enroll their children in New St. Andrews or to join Christ Church.

New St. Andrews students are used to the challenge that their college is a narrow-minded place. Brad Littlejohn, 19, often argues with his grandfather, a Jewish agnostic. “My grandfather says, you’re afraid of having your beliefs challenged,” Brad says. “That’s a psychological claim, and there’s no way to refute that. I wanted a Christian-worldview education not because I felt that if I got a secular-worldview education it would weaken my faith, but it wouldn’t nourish me in the same way.” The students are bright. The average SAT score is a respectable 1,214 out of 1,600, nearly on par with schools like George Washington University (though about 110 points behind Patrick Henry’s average). The 88 percent admission rate is deceptive, given the college’s low public profile and self-selecting applicant pool: students at N.S.A. have thought carefully about why they are here.

Students’ postcollege goals are fairly ordinary, ranging from academia and law to construction and choral conducting, but they approach graduation with a sense of mission sharpened by N.S.A.’s distinctive culture.

The school has adopted trappings of Oxford and Cambridge: professors are called “fellows,” and students dress in academic gowns for thesis defenses and public final exams. Proudly Anglophile, faculty members lead a summer tour of English castles and abbeys. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton are ubiquitous on class reading lists — revered for their godly wit and their fondness for fine drink. N.S.A.’s campus is proudly wet, in deliberate contrast to the average fundamentalist Bible college.

The Oxbridge traditions; the college’s nine-point Latin grading scale (from Summa Cum Laude down to a failing Minime); the nameplates (in honor of Augustine, Calvin and the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen) that take the place of room numbers outside its three modest classrooms; these constantly remind students that they attend a Christian college with class. Donna Foucachon, an American who moved to Idaho from Lyon, France, with her French husband after their sons chose to attend New St. Andrews, said that the N.S.A. education impressed her French brother-in-law, who “is an extremely cultured, educated man who worked in government and ate with the shah. He’s not of the same [religious] persuasion as us, but he looks at what they’re studying, and he says, This is true education.” N.S.A. aims to turn on its head the historian Richard Hofstadter’s old stereotype of the resentful evangelical bumpkin who equates intellectual life and high culture with privilege and social status he doesn’t have.

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These flourishes are also intended as proof of intellectual seriousness. “I’m critical of evangelical anti-intellectualism — the attitude that it’s not important to learn because we’ll all be raptured soon,” says Matthew McCabe, the N.S.A. alumnus, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in medieval English literature at the University of Toronto. “I’m also critical of the view of pragmatists, who are receptive to education but only to pragmatic ends.” Fundamentally, the college tries to reunite faith and reason: to devise a medieval antidote to the post-Enlightenment confinement of religion to Sunday morning. In a community this tightly knit, where weekends bring more bonding at church, marathon Sunday brunches and endless “psalm sings” (if you come to N.S.A. without having mastered four-part fugal harmony, you’d better learn quick), the pomp and ritual further bond students from 31 states and five foreign countries into a band of cultured missionaries.

Students at New St. Andrews grin and complain that their teachers assign more than 1,000 pages of reading each week. Seniors write theses that run to more than 80 pages. Yet intellectual merit badges cannot guarantee an education in critical thinking. Evan Wilson, 52, has been estranged from his older brother’s church and college ever since a theological quarrel in the late 1980s that he dubs “the Great Unpleasantness.” We sat in his library, a forest green room appointed with leather club chairs and pictures of the Battle of Waterloo. Lighting his briar pipe, Evan called himself “the local Pelagian” and explained his very un-Calvinist view that God cannot predestine our future because the future does not exist; it is only an abstract concept, shaped by our free will. He runs his own church — one of three Wilson ministries in town, including that of his father, Jim, who brought the family to Moscow in the early 1970s to found a chain of Christian bookstores.

Evan sees a lack of critical thinking among N.S.A. students, an inability to systematically question their own assumptions. “When I meet these young men who are trying to smoke pipes and talk about Chesterton, and they haven’t put Chesterton through the wringer, all I’ll say is, ‘Look, guys, his good turn of phrase in “Orthodoxy” does not make him a good thinker,’ ” he said. “When I went through college, some of my greatest moments of advancement were with a professor who hated my guts and didn’t agree with any of my premises. . . . Our thoughts exist in broader company.”

The faculty at New St. Andrews is hardly diverse. Several are N.S.A. graduates who went on to do master’s degrees elsewhere and came back to teach. Only 4 of 17 faculty members have Ph.D.’s (those few are always addressed as “Doctor” — proof that N.S.A. has not entirely escaped the intellectual insecurity typical of evangelical colleges). Doug Wilson’s son, son-in-law and youngest brother teach at the college. “Someone’s going to say, ‘Isn’t that a little cozy?’ ” Wilson admits. “Part of modernity’s negative legacy is the pretense of objectivity. All institutions thrive on interconnectedness, affection and loyalty.” N.S.A.’s philosophy is that cultural change begins with right worship and community rather than with political activism. College life revolves around Christ Church and Trinity Reformed Church — both members of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination based on “historic Protestant orthodoxy” that Wilson co-founded in 1998. The college handbook forbids students to embrace or promote “doctrinal errors” from the 4th through the 21st centuries, “such as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism.” If drawn to such ideas, they must “inform the administration immediately and honestly in a letter offering to withdraw from the College.” Cultural revolution cannot tolerate heretics.

JOSHUA APPEL, A MODEL N.S.A. professor, graduated from New St. Andrews in 2001. He did a master’s degree at Reformed Theological Seminary in Florida before returning to his alma mater to teach and raise a family. (His wife is also an N.S.A. alumna — the school is a capable matchmaker, and during May and June student weddings occupy nearly every weekend.) At 2 p.m. one Friday, a group of students gathered for a seminar in Appel’s living room. One boy, perched on the piano bench, offered some armchair psychology on the week’s reading: the letters of Abelard and Heloise. Two girls balanced mugs of tea on their knees and wondered how Heloise could disregard God’s command against fornication. Appel seemed frustrated. He wanted them to find connections between this text and previous readings, not offer casual opinions. As at any college, on some days discussion is better than others — and sometimes students clam up in the presence of an observer. But perhaps strict theological conformity has its drawbacks. The college “could have been a more vibrant place for debate,” recalls Matthew McCabe.

Like the majority of his classmates, Eric Mabry, a 21-year-old from Texas who hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, was home-schooled. Before he got his driver’s license he was studying Latin and reading Thomas Aquinas. At N.S.A., he is known for occasionally wearing a monk’s habit. When he told professors at his local community college that he was going to attend New St. Andrews, “it created a small firestorm,” Eric says. N.S.A. was not even accredited back then. But the teachers close to him respected his choice because “they knew me and they knew my presuppositions,” he says. “People in a secular school are just as constrained. The only difference is, I’m aware of my worldview.” Eric smiles. “Some call it a straitjacket — I prefer to think of it as a nicely fitted suit.”

The phrases that N.S.A. students are trained to use — like “Christian worldview” and “presuppositions” — are the tag lines of the theological tradition that partly inspired their college. In the early 20th century, a Dutch theologian named Cornelius Van Til introduced a kind of theology called presuppositionalism. He argued that no assumptions are neutral and that the human mind can comprehend reality only if proceeding from the truth of biblical revelation. In other words, it is impossible for Christians to reason with non-Christians. presuppositionalism is a strangely postmodern theory that denies the possibility of objectivity — though it does not deny the existence of truth, which belongs to Christians alone.

According to critics, this school of thought equips young Christians to read and discuss non-Christian ideas without ever taking them seriously. “The trouble is that once you’ve figured out someone’s presuppositions, you can write them off as right or wrong without having to deal with their arguments. . . . It becomes anti-intellectual,” says Darryl Hart, a historian who has taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, the birthplace of presuppositionalism. Token “anti-Christians” like Margaret Sanger, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin appear on N.S.A. syllabuses, but students say these rarely generate serious debate. Darwin, for his part, remains only “a curious event in the history of modern secularism,” Matthew McCabe says.

Students at New St. Andrews rarely read Van Til’s dense theological treatises. They absorb his ideas from their teachers. A few faculty members at New St. Andrews also had links with a largely defunct offshoot of Van Til’s thought called Christian Reconstructionism. The movement’s founder, Rousas John Rushdoony, wrote that Christians should gradually take control of society and reinstate Old Testament law — including the execution of adulterers and homosexuals. Most N.S.A. faculty members are quick to distance themselves from the movement, but not Doug Wilson.

Wilson emphasizes his flexibility when it comes to Old Testament law. “You can’t apply Scripture woodenly,” he says; instead of executing them, “you might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim.” He adds: “There are circumstances in which I’d be in favor of execution for adultery. . . . I’m not proposing legislation. We’re saying, Let’s set up the Christian worldview, and our descendants 500 years from now can work out the knotty problems.” Gene Veith, who is provost of Patrick Henry College and active in classical Christian education, fears Wilson’s views are a handicap for the movement. “One of the frustrating things for me is that people sometimes associate the classical Christian education movement with Doug Wilson, so some people are sort of afraid of it,” he says.

Wilson and others at New St. Andrews say they are laying the groundwork for the long-term reinvigoration of evangelical intellectual life — and for Christian cultural ascendancy. Time and again, they assert that they are not trying to influence politics and that the antagonism they face is persecution. “The Gospels make it clear that as we’re faithful, we can expect opposition,” says Peter Leithart, who teaches theology. It’s hard to deny, however, that Wilson goes out of his way to provoke. “The object was to take over the town with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to do it in an underground fashion,” says Wilson’s father, now nearly 80 and still running his ministry. “One of the principles of war is surprise. You don’t tell people what you’re going to do. Doug told them, and he gave them someone to shoot at.”

Evan Wilson, who disagrees with his brother on most things, does credit the leaders of New St. Andrews with remaining true to their vision. Rather than seeking change “by force of vote,” he says, they look to “a natural percolation of this culture they’re offering.” Yet, to quote the iconic conservative author Richard Weaver, “ideas have consequences.” New St. Andrews’s chronic spats with liberals in town belie the claim that one can wholly separate the noble liberal arts from the crass business of politics. “For years, evangelicals have been fighting abortion and evolution with rubber-band guns, but there’s all this great stuff from thousands of years ago, when they were wrestling with similar questions,” says Joanna Gray, a 24-year-old alumna. “It’s there to be found — you just have to study and find it.”

Molly Worthen is writing a book about evangelical intellectual life.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 684 of the New York edition with the headline: Onward Christian Scholars. Today's Paper|Subscribe